Guardian Cryptic 28,550 by Anto

105 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 28,550 by Anto”

1. I took 20a to be a cryptic definition, referring to the Nixon transcripts in which “EXPLETIVE DELETED” often appeared.

   Thanks for explaining STILL LIFE: I forgot about the old dog.

2. I wish I could parse EXPLETIVE. I like Miche’s explanation. Plus I did not see the “still life in the old dog yet” either but since that was my LOI I was happy I’d finished everything. Thanks Anto for this entertainment. Thanks loonapick for explaining (almost) everything.

3. I also took ages to parse STILL LIFE, as the form familiar to me is ‘there’s life in the old dog yet’.

4. I’m glad it’s not just me about EXPLETIVE. A reminder of a time when senior politicos did recognising that someone had done wrong…
   Not entirely convinced that ASBESTOS is properly described as a toxin, but much else to be entertained by. I know it’s been done before, but the heel getting into Oxford still amuses.
   Thanks to both.

5. Came here expecting to find the parsing of EXPLETIVE and STILL LIFE, so I am not surprised they were tricky (like Dicky). ASBESTOS is not a toxin: toxins are produced inside living cells. It took me a while to piece this together, partly because of the above OBSCUR[E]ities. I quite often find Anto challenging – must be a wavelength thing. Thanks, Anto and loonapick.

6. I enjoyed this and found it fairly straightforward, but like some others couldn’t parse EXPLETIVE and STILL LIFE. Homophone corner: I’ve always thought Chopin was more like ‘shop Ann’, but there you go. Thanks to Anto and loonapick.

7. When solving online I tend to bung in plausible solutions without parsing because if correct they will help with the crossing clues and if too many crossers then seem difficult I can erase the guess without making a mess. It usually works and I can go back and parse them later. There are usually a couple I do like that, but in this case there were a few more than usual and most turned out to be wrong, but I realised the errors quickly enough.

   I hope somebody can come up with a better parsing for “still life” because I really don’t like it, but I fear it is probably right. It was nearly my last one in but in contrast to my statement above, I didn’t write it in until I had solved the crossers independently.

8. Quite difficult and I was unable to parse a few of my solutions: 11ac (apart from the AU bit); 20ac EXPLETIVE; 22ac; 7d ASS (idiot) + UAGES [i suspect I do not know how to pronounce the word ASSUAGES lol]; and 14d.

   I liked: HEAVEN ON EARTH, FRANKENSTEIN.

   Thanks, both.

   I had assumed that 10ac was a triple def.

9. I, too, was stuck on the parsing of STILL LIFE and I agree with Miche @1 and others about EXPLETIVE deleted. I think there is a typo in the blog for 10dn.

   Thanks Anto and loonapick.

10. Thanks Anto and loonapick. I liked AUDIT, MINUS and TEETHING PAINS best. I think your parsing of 10a is fine.

    Couldn’t parse STILL LIFE despite guessing that “setter” meant “dog”… Hmm, not entirely convinced the clue works. Why “devoured”?

    Didn’t get EXPLETIVE either but Miche @1’s explanation makes sense.

11. 10ac – Surely anagram of “over anne” in heath, not hearth?

12. Yep same dnps as others, and as per TT @5, thinking ‘it’s a carcinogen not a toxin’. But an ok little puzzle anyhoo. Ta both.

13. Thanks Anto and loonapick
    I had no trouble with EXPLETIVE as I am old enough to remember the Nixon tapes. I wasn’t confident with HANDS ON, and I didn’t parse STILL LIFE either. I’ve come across SCREED as a long boring written text rather than a speech, though I see that it could be either.
    I was held up in the SE by entering a plausible REI(g)NS ar 22, but LEASH is better.
    No particular standout clues, though I did smile at SHOEHORN.

14. Answering my own question: “devoured by” = “in”. Ok, I get it now. Still don’t love it though.

15. I forgot to say: wouldn’t 6d have more misdirection if it was “takeaway” rather than “take away”, as it might be seen as referring to McDonalds?
    I agree about ASBESTOS not being, strictly, a toxin.

16. I guessed EXPLETIVE from its Watergate allusions: if there is more to the wordplay than that and the hint of an EX-Presidential beginning, I can’t see it. If STILL LIFE is based on the “old dog” saying it doesn’t really work for me, but I can’t think of anything else. I also thought SCREEDs were written not spoken. But there was a lot to like about this one, my favourite being SHOEHORN which I for one haven’t met before – but why the ellipsis from SCREED?

17. drofle@6: re the pronunciation of CHOPIN… see here. OUCH.

18. @16 Gladys – I can only assume it makes some sense of the wordplay for Shoehorn (in so much as the opening words are relatively nonsensical without an ellipsis to justify the wordplay in that clue – if that makes any sense!!

19. While I think the intended parsing of 14 has been identified, it doesn’t quite work for me as I’ve only ever heard it as “There’s life in the old dog yet”. ‘Still…yet’ is tautologous.

20. Strange puzzle today – some answers just let into my head when I read them (especially if I had a crosser) but sometimes although I was sure of the answer I couldn’t parse them – e.g. STILL LIFE.

    Others, even when I got them, seemed not really to match the definition part of the clue.

    Still I did enjoy it. Favourite was SHOEHORN – made me laugh and I haven’t seen it before. Others I liked included: AUDIT, HEAD START, BAGPIPER, ASSUAGES

    Thanks Anto and loonapick

21. lept not let

22. I rather enjoyed this. “EXPLETIVE deleted” was such a catch phrase back in Watergate days. And I remember having a t-shirt with a picture of an old mutt and an old master and the caption “Still life in the old dog”. Is this an age thing? Perhaps it’s not so clear to younger solvers.
    Thanks to Anto and loonapick

23. I was intrigued with your ’quintic’, to begin with loonapick – a new format maybe? I have always liked Anto, despite his detractors, and this again was very satisfying. Well done miche @1 for unraveling EXPLETIVE and loonapick for explaining STILL LIFE. I really liked TRUNCATE and STAND UP COMIC.

    Ta both

24. Surely, Miche @1 is right–Nixon should have been the first thing that popped into the head of any geezers among us. “Deleted” is crucial to putting the clue across–“expletive deleted” became as hackneyed a catchphrase as “wardrobe malfunction” would become for a later generation.

    I could make no sense of STILL LIFE, but admire its cleverness, now that it’s been explained to me. I concur in loonapick’s parsing of HANDS ON.

    Thank you, Anto and loonapick!

25. I certainly thought of Tricky Dicky for 20a at the time, but – given the EX P you could get from the clue (as loonapick says), I was wondering how the rest of the wordplay for LETIVE worked. It turned out there was no wordplay and that the EX P bit was just coincicence – or was it????

26. I was teaching in Papua New Guinea at the time of Watergate, and my class listened to Nixon’s speech of resignation. At the end, one of my students asked “Why is he resigning since he said he had done nothing wrong?”. Perceptive question.

27. I’m with SimonS @16 re STILL LIFE and it’s tautological element. Only a minor quibble, though.

    Pick off the crop for me this morning was the excellent MINUS with its smooth fast food misdirect.

    Is the final “it” in the STAND UP COMIC clue a reference to that old crossword standard for “sex”?

    Lovely puzzle and a fine blog, many thanks, both.

28. I too was concerned about the ellipses between 25 and 26. It’s rather tenuous but , in plastering, a screed can be a strip of material which is used as a guide.

29. 20a, I immediately thought of Nixon but wondered if PL might be reverse of LP, a record. That doesn’t help much as we are still left with ETIV or even EX..ETIVE. I suppose we might remove CD (another record) from EVICTED. But surely all that is too convoluted?

30. AlanC @23, I too was amused that loonapick doesn’t do quintics. Bit of an obscure mathematical joke, but it was proved a long time ago that no-one can!

31. I thought this was a good, entertaining crossword. Anto has certainly improved a lot since his early Quiptic days.

    Crossbar @22, I think this is the picture you were remembering with the caption: Still life in the old dog, yet. The only slight blemish was that I agree that ASBESTOS is not really a toxin; as grantinfreo @12 says, it’s a carcinogen.

    I liked SHOEHORN and EMOTE.

    Thanks Anto and loonapick.

32. Largely enjoyable puzzle with some good constructions and surfaces (like William @27 I was particularly amused by MINUS).

    ‘Toxin’ grated with me too – it smacks of the terminology of quackery (though no amount of spring water will ‘eliminate’ asbestos). EXPLETIVE is a puzzle. The Nixon reference came to me immediately but I can’t see any other construction either. If there isn’t a charade here which none of us is able to disentangle it is a poor clue: for those of us who remember Watergate it isn’t even slightly cryptic, and if you don’t recognise the allusion it is impenetrable.

    Nevertheless thanks to Anto and loonapick.

33. Thank you, Robi @31. That’s the one!

34. Xword enjoyable and fairly straightforward I thought, but can anyone explain the reference to “quintics” for me, and what the joke is …..?

35. Strange how we pronounce Chopin as if he were French rather than Polish. I remember my initial confusion when reading references to Szopen. I can’t think of any other examples of where we change the spelling of a name from a language which uses the same alphabet.

36. Petert @35. Chopin’s father was from France. His mother was Polish and he was born and brought up in I think Warsaw. Szopen is what the French “Chopin” sounds like in Polish. Polish often absorbs words from other languages and gives them the Polish spelling.

37. Crossbar@35. Thanks for that.

38. Knowing that ASBESTOS isn’t a toxin resulted in spending time trying to find anything else to fit – even tried to parse OSTEITIS, although that’s not one either. I agree with Gervase@32 that EXPLETIVE is simply GK and not at all cryptic.

39. I agree with Robi’s opening sentences @31. – and thanks for the picture, Robi.

    This puzzle proved again, for me – not that any proof was needed, since I’m always saying it – that puzzles don’t have to be difficult to be enjoyable and entertaining.

    There were some nice surfaces here and some interesting constructions. I had ticks for 1 TRUNCATE, 13 FRANKENSTEIN, 23 TIPTOES and 26ac HEEL(unlike NeilH, I don’t remember seeing it before) and 3 COUNTERED, 6 MINUS, 8 MONOTONY,10 HEAVEN ON EARTH and 15 ASBESTOS despite the quibble about toxin, which I wasn’t aware of. (‘Older’ commenters should look away now, as they know that I can never see ASBOS without quoting the late and still lamented Linda Smith on The News Quiz.)

    In 20ac, I tried to take something off archIVE (log) but obviously didn’t get very far, so I have to agree with others that the clue seems to be not at all cryptic, which is a pity. I was happy with STILL LIFE, though.

    Jinja @34 – read loonapick’s preamble again. 😉

    Many thanks to Anto and loonapick.

40. Jinja @34- I originally put quintics in the intro rather than quiptics – a simple typo. Quintics are very complicated formulae that cannot be solved algebraically making them difficult for the layman, much like my effort at understanding EXPLETIVE, which I would never have worked out in a month of Sundays…

41. Petert/Crossbar @35/36 – fascinating Q and A, thanks! Here’s Chopin’s French papa.

    On the more general question of changing the spelling of a name from a language which uses the same alphabet, we do it with Pliny (in fact both Plinies/Plinii?). And with place names, we have Rome, Naples, Turin, Milan… and that’s just Italy!

    Eileen – thanks for the Linda Smith/ASBO reminder (it’s up there with “Anthony… if you’ve got an ology, you’re a scientist!”).

    [loonapick @40 – them pesky quintics just won’t go away 😉 ]

    Oh, and the crossword was nice too.

42. … loonapick @40 – Murphy’s Law.

43. … sorry, I’ve just done it, and it should be Muphry’s Law …

44. Robi @42
    I think the law you are referring to in this instance is actually Muphry’s 🙂

45. Bloody autocorrect 🙁

46. Thanks to Anto and loonapick etc.

    I enjoyed that.

    Jinja@34: I think your confusion stems from a misprint – “quintics” for “quiptics” (now corrected in the preamble) which has led to some gentle joshing by those among us who know that “quintics” are actually a thing (not me).

47. Hi essexboy @41

    I agree and – you must have known I couldn’t resist – here she is.

48. Thanks loonapick (and Robi@31 for the illustration) as I had no idea what was going on with STILL LIFE, agree with the more common quibbles but nothing too serious (ie nothing that stopped me from getting the answers, fortunately!) and overall found this good fun, thanks Anto.

49. [Thanks Eileen @47 – “you know, it’s the teachers who are wrong…” 😉 ]

50. Thanks Anto & loonapick.
    Like others I tried to parse LETIVE, but nevertheless enjoyed the challenge, and I thought the puzzle generally had a nice positivity with solutions such as RAISE UP & UPSIDE.
    Perhaps (from STILL LIFE) FRANKENSTEIN, with a bit of HANDS ON and a HEAD START, was enabled to STAND UP on TIPTOES and EMOTE? Or maybe not!

51. [wynsum @50 – he might have done… if Frankenstein had been the monster! 😉 ]

52. Yes, mistaken I am …’s monster obvs! 🙂
    btw how do you do emojis?

53. … ah, just like that apparently!

54. wynsum – see here

55. Ah – too late. 🙁

56. [essexboy @41: The English names of those Italian cities are not alternative spellings to fit with English orthography but are exonyms – names of places used by people other than their inhabitants (though Turin and Milan are the names of Torino and Milano in Piedmontese and Lombard dialect respectively). But they are clearly cognate, unlike some of the traditional exonyms in Eastern Europe: Bratislava was Pressburg in German and Pozsony in Hungarian]

57. I enjoyed the puzzle, mostly, and the quintics fun in the blog. I normally don’t leave a completed puzzle until I’ve parsed everything to my satisfaction, but this time failed with EXPLETIVE and STILL LIFE. Seems I wasn’t alone, by a long shot.

58. Thanks, Eileen that’s brilliant!

59. Enjoyable and nice to finish.
    Struggled with STILL LIFE as I know the expression as “there’s life in the old dog yet”.
    EXPLETIVE was a bung in (of course), thank for the heads up on the Tricky Dickie connection. There was an excellent series on Netflix recently about Watergate.
    CHOPIN does not work for me unless my pronunciation is way-off.
    Thanks Loonapick for the hints.

60. Gervase@56 I was just wondering if there was a word to describe names like Leghorn for Livorno and then you enlighten me with exonym. Thanks

61. Eileen @47 thanks that’s great…I saw Maureen Lipman as a tribute to Joyce Grenfell in the West End, she was marvellous.

62. Thanks for the blog. many quintics can be solved by factorisation or reduction methods, there is however no GENERAL method for solving all quintics, unlike polynomial equations up to and including power 4.
    This was almost proved by Ruffini and finally proved by Abel.

63. Found this pretty tough. Didn’t parse several of them but finished it.

64. HoofItYouDonkey – I’ve seen that tribute – to yet another wonderfully funny woman – on television.

65. Two zloty’s worth about Chopin/Szopen: The Poles seem to have given up on the Polish spelling of what is, after all, a French name. See “Lotnisko Chopina w Warszawie” for example (where Chopina is simply the genitive of Chopin).

    However, they do fiercely and patriotically refer to Marie Curie as “Maria Curie-Sk?odowska”.

    Nice puzzle I thought, though I am another who needed help parsing “EXPLETIVE” (in spite of being old enough to have known better) and even “LEASH”- d’oh!

    Now looking to try my hand at a quintic….:-D

    Thanks, loonapick and Anton.

66. Deep Thought@65 It’s partly patriotism and partly just the Polish way of retaining a maiden name after marriage.

67. Expletive [definition] sworn by president once and deleted from the record [clue]. “Expletive deleted” became a phrase from the Watergate hearing’s transcriptions of Nixon’s tapes without Tricky’s effing. Excellent clue.

68. Apologies to Loonapick and Eileen: I’m sure it was quintics when I read it first ….

69. @Fiery Jack. From pedants corner: many a quintic *can* be solved (eg x^5 – 1 = 0). The theorem to which you refer says there is no way of expressing the solution in radicals (which include surds such as square roots), i.e. no general algorithm for finding an analytic solution. Numerical solutions to any degree of accuracy are accessible, so in practice solving quintics are no trouble at all.

70. Thanks Anto for proving Eileen right when she says crosswords need not be difficult to be “enjoyable and entertaining.” My favourites included AUDIT, LEASH (amusing surface), and MINUS. I immediately thought of “expletive deleted” in solving 20a but didn’t feel that was cryptic enough for a British puzzle. Thanks loonapick for explaining ASBESTOS and STILL LIFE, both beyond my parsing ability.

71. Hi Jinja @68

    No need for an apology: it was ‘quintics’ originally, as loonapick acknowledged @40.

72. [DeepThought @65 / Petert @66
    I thought I hadn’t seen the Szopen variant for some time.
    I love the way some words, especially computer terms get incorporated into Polish. E.g “click” (as in right or left mouse click) is klik in Polish, a homonym, but the imperative uses the Polish verb ending and is “kliknij” which appears to have little relation to the original.
    I guess this happens in other languages too.
    Digression over.]

73. [Crossbar @ 72 et al

    It’s computer terms into foreign languages and their subsequent standard treatment that amuses me. In a past life I had to liaise with the IT dept of our German parent. The number of crossovers was enormous, but the one that has always stuck is ‘to download’ = ‘downloaden’, past tense ‘downgeloadet’.

    In the early days my technical vocabulary was limited, and I was struggling for the German for “Our server has crashed”, only to be told it was “Unser Server hat gekrascht”.]

74. [Great examples Simon S @ 73 ? ]

75. Hmm. The ? was supposed to be an emoji.

76. Enjoyable, if all too brief fun. Thanks Anto and loonapick

77. [Thanks Gervase @56. There seems to be some suggestion (here for example) that ‘exonym’ can cover personal names as well as place names and ethnic groups. If so, that puts Szopen in what must be a very unusual category – an exonym used by Poles to refer to a Pole.

    There’s a list here of (foreign) personal names which have a different form in English, which includes Pliny, Horace, Pompey & Co, but also Columbus, Magellan, Cabot and Jackie Mason!

    Re IT – click and double-click are cliquer and double-cliquer in French, which theoretically opens up the possibility of any number of verb endings. Sadly, I’ve yet to come across an imperfect subjunctive – il faudrait que je cliquasse…]

78. Almost finished this – only STILL LIFE and SHOEHORN defeated me. Very pleased as it wasn’t a Monday!
    And for those who remember the Nixon phrase era, Fairport Convention released their “Expletive Delighted” album.

79. Enjoyable and not a pushover by any means.

    Didn’t have a clue how to parse expletive, somewhat relieved to find I wasn’t alone. Thanks to the many above who have explained it.

    MINUS and LEASH were excellent I thought but did raise an eyebrow at ASBESTOS, I think ‘something toxic’ or carcinogen would perhaps be a better def.

    Congratulations smot @78, you should be pleased!

80. Essexboy@77 My favourite polonisation is Wolter. Kopernik could almost fall into the same category as Szopen.

81. If anyone is still there I would just like to add to Simon S’s examples that in my misspent youth in Germany we girls, preparing to go out on the town, would get upgetarted!

82. [Petert @80 – thanks, I had to look that one up – Voltaire!]

    [trishincharente @81: love it 🙂 ]

83. Sorry to be stupid, can someone explain what the word ‘oath’ is doing in 20? I can see how (expletive deleted) is what is being referenced, and so something ‘sworn’ by [nixon] once deleted could = expletive, but ‘oath’ I don’t understand? Thanks.

84. Stuart @83
    “Oath” can mean “swearword” as well as “vow”.

85. Thanks Muffin. New one for me.

86. Hi Stuart, not a stupid question at all. Oath has several meanings, which include not only a promise but also a curse or swear word.

    It’s no coincidence that one swears an oath.

    In this case oath is actually the definition as both an oath and a swear word can be an expletive.

    Hope that helps.

87. Sorry muffin should have refreshed

88. I must say that STILL LIFE and particularly CHOPIN strike me as the two worst clues I can recall seeing in the Guardian. I’ve never heard of the saying except as ‘life in the old dog yet’ – isn’t ‘still’ what ‘yet’ means? – and who on earth says Showpan, or anything remotely like it, for the composer?

89. Radixnephew @88
    Mmmm – everyone who pronounces his name correctly? How would you pronounce Chopin? Surely not “choppin|”!

90. HenryL @69: pedantry is always very welcome where maths is concerned, and I acknowledge I sacrificed some for the sake of a one-liner ?. I always thought Galois had proved that, but after a bit of research I stand corrected. Thanks!

91. That ? was a smiley face before I posted it btw

92. Fiery Jack, you need to leave a space either side of your emoticon construction, your full stop stopped the translation. There is a set of instructions ok them for here.

93. Fiery Jack @91. Maybe you have to do a smiley the old-fashioned way with a : followed by ) hopefully like this 🙂

94. Aha. Success.

95. Bloody autocorrect what on earth is wrong with the word for? Why on earth would that be changed to OK?

96. Sorry Blah @92. We crossed. I was trying to use the emojis on my phone’s text handling.

97. Yeah I tried that at first too it’s emoticons that work rather than emojis,

98. Muffin – well, it’s not ‘pan’, is it? It’s more like the French ‘pain’ to the English ear, though I’m sure French people can tell the difference.

    Like this, basically https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftTTstT6hHo

99. Radixnephew @98: yes, it is exactly like ‘pain’ in French, and I do agree SHOWPAN does grate a bit. But it is the closest English approximation to the French nasal sound, and as such it’s the version I’ve most commonly heard in England. At least it’s better than lon-je-ray!

100. Enjoyed but like others stumped to explain EXPLETIVE and STILL LIFE. Knowing what an expletive is didn’t help. (Not an oath)
     Thanks Alto and loonapick

101. An expletive not an oath? My oath, it is!

102. Re the pronunciation of Chopin as, I assumed, a francophone ‘show-pang’, and bemused by today’s clue, I checked several references.

     It seems we’re wrong. The Polish is Szopen, so there is a hard ‘n’ at the end.

     The things one learns from crosswords, eh! Wouldn’t change it for the world.

103. I think wynsum@50 is onto it. Gotta be a theme!

     Wikitripping led me to the 1910 Frankenstein silent horror film, produced by THOMAS Edison, yes, that Thomas Edison, who amongst his many inventions involving electricity also built devices for filming and projection , and then made the films available to the public.

     I tried to drop a graphic in here of Thomas Edison’s ‘Kinetogram’ poster of Frankenstein but it didn’t work.

104. That would be fine, SimonS, if the answer were Szopen (and if solvers could be reasonably expected to know how to pronounce Polish words). But it isn’t. The Francophone form which is the answer to the clue just is not pronounced like a god. It’s a ridiculous clue; it’s not even as if it was a good clue if it had worked, nor as if Chopin is a hard word to clue properly.

     And while I’m ranting HANDS ON was dreadful as well; how is ‘being practical’ a different use of the phrase from ‘close working style’? And how is ‘puts forward’ even a synonym for ‘hands on’? Perhaps I don’t understand the intended parsing.

105. Late comment so no one will see this, but anyway…
     I agree with Radixnephew@104 that ShowPan is not how most people pronounce the composer’s name, but crossword homophones do not have to sound exactly the same. (It’s interesting how people’s response to clues can vary so much – 19d CHOPIN and 10a HANDS ON were two of my favourites.)
     My quiblettino is 1a TRUNCATE. I have never seen C for contralto; I’ve only seen A. Has four-part choral music ever been described as SCTB?
     That, and my inability to parse STILLLIFE, in no way lessened my enjoyment of this very nice puzzle. Thanks Anto and loonapick.

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